Sunday, 7 January 2018

      No comments

Egyptian revolution of 2011

Egyptian revolution of 2011

Source - wikipedia
The Egyptian revolution of 2011, locally known as the January 25 Revolution(Egyptian Arabic: ثورة 25 يناير‎; Thawret 25 yanāyir),[21] began on 25 January 2011 and took place across all of Egypt. The date was set by various youth groups to coincide with the annual Egyptian "police day" as a statement against increasing police brutality during the last few years of Mubarak's presidency. It consisted of demonstrations, marches, occupations of plazas, non-violentcivil resistance, acts of civil disobedience and strikes. Millions of protesters from a range ofsocio-economic and religious backgrounds demanded the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The revolution started by calls for protests from online youth groups. Initially these included liberal, anti-capitalist, nationalist, and feminist elements, but they finally included Islamist elements as well. Violent clashes between security forces and protesters resulted in at least 846 people killed and over 6,000 injured.[22][23] Protesters retaliated by burning over 90 police stations across the country.[24] The protests took place in Cairo, Alexandria, and in all major cities across the nation.
2011 Egyptian revolution
Part of the Egyptian Crisis and the Arab Spring
Tahrir Square during 8 February 2011.jpg
Demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square on 8 February 2011
Date25 January 2011 – 11 February 2011
(2 weeks and 3 days)
LocationEgypt
Caused by
Methods
Resulted in
Number
2,000,000 at Cairo's Tahrir square[15]
See: Regions section below.
Casualties
Death(s)
Injuries6,467 people[16]
Arrested12,000[20]
The Egyptian protesters' grievances focused on legal and political issues,[25] includingpolice brutality, state-of-emergency laws,[1]lack of free elections and freedom of speech, corruption,[2] and economic issues including high unemployment, food-price inflation[3] and low wages.[1][3] The protesters' primary demands were the end of the Mubarak regime and emergency law, freedom, justice, a responsive non-military government and a voice in managing Egypt's resources.[26]Strikes by labour unions added to the pressure on government officials.[27]
During the uprising, the capital Cairo was described as "a war zone"[28] and the port city of Suez saw frequent violent clashes. Protesters defied a government-imposedcurfew, which was impossible to enforce by the police and military. Egypt's Central Security Forces, loyal to Mubarak, were gradually replaced by military troops. In the chaos, there was some looting by gangs which was instigated (according to opposition sources) by plainclothes police officers. In response, watch groups were organized by civilians to protect neighbourhoods.[29][30][31][32][33]
International reaction has varied, with most Western nations condoning peaceful protests but concerned about the stability of Egypt and the region. The Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions have influenced demonstrations in other Arab countries, including Yemen,Bahrain, Jordan, Syria and Libya.
Mubarak dissolved his government, appointing former head of the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate Omar Suleiman vice-president in an attempt to quell dissent. Mubarak asked aviation minister and former chief of Egypt's air force Ahmed Shafik(who ran for presidency later) to form a new government. Mohamed ElBaradei became a major opposition figure, with all major opposition groups supporting his role as negotiator for a transitional unity government.[34] In response to mounting pressure, Mubarak, in another attempt to contain the crisis, announced he did not intend to seek re-election in September.[35]
On 11 February 2011, Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that Mubarak would resign as president, turning power over to theSupreme Council of the Armed Forces(SCAF).[36] The military junta, headed by effective head of state Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, announced on 13 February that the constitution would be suspended, both houses of parliament dissolved and the military would rule for six months (until elections could be held). The previous cabinet, including Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik, would serve as a caretaker government until a new one was formed.[37]Shafik, seen by the masses as another Mubarak figure, resigned on 3 March, a day before major protests to force him to step down were planned, and was replaced by former transport minister Essam Sharaf.[38]On 24 May 2011, Mubarak was ordered to stand trial on charges of premeditated murderof peaceful protesters and, if convicted, could have faced the death penalty.[12] On 2 June 2012, Mubarak was found guilty of complicity in the murder of protesters and sentenced to life imprisonment, but the sentence was overturned on appeal and a retrial ordered.[39]A number of protesters, upset that others tried with Mubarak (including his two sons) were acquitted, took to the streets.[40]Mubarak was eventually cleared of all charges on 29 November 2014,[41] although Egypt's prosecutor general announced he would appeal the verdict.[42]
After the revolution against Mubarak and a period of rule by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt through a series of popular elections, with Egyptians electing IslamistMohamed Morsi to the presidency in June 2012.[43] However, Morsi's government encountered fierce opposition after his attempt to pass an Islamist constitution that followed extreme Islamist views. Morsi attempted also to change laws granting himself unparalleled powers like no other president in Egyptian history. It sparked general outrage from secularists and members of the military, and mass protestsbroke out against his rule on 28 June 2013.[44]On 3 July 2013, Morsi was deposed by a coup d'état led by the minister of defense, General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi[45] as millions of Egyptians took to the streets in support of early elections.[46] El-Sisi went on to become Egypt's president by popular election in 2014.[47]
      No comments

1327 King Edward II of England is deposed.

Edward II (25 April 1284 – 21 September 1327), also called Edward of Caernarfon, wasKing of England from 1307 until he wasdeposed in January 1327. The fourth son ofEdward I, Edward became the heir to the throne following the death of his older brotherAlphonso. Beginning in 1300, Edward accompanied his father on campaigns to pacify Scotland, and in 1306 he was knightedin a grand ceremony at Westminster Abbey. Edward succeeded to the throne in 1307, following his father's death. In 1308, he married Isabella of France, the daughter of the powerful King Philip IV, as part of a long-running effort to resolve the tensions between the English and French crowns.
Edward II
Edward II - detail of tomb.jpg
King of England (more...)
Reign7 July 1307 – 25 January 1327
Coronation25 February 1308
PredecessorEdward I
SuccessorEdward III
Born25 April 1284
Caernarfon Castle, Gwynedd, Wales
Died21 September 1327 (aged 43)
Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire
Burial20 December 1327
Gloucester Cathedral, Gloucestershire, England
SpouseIsabella of France (m. 1308)
Issue
Detail
HousePlantagenet
FatherEdward I of England
MotherEleanor of Castile
Edward had a close and controversial relationship with Piers Gaveston, who had joined his household in 1300. The precise nature of Edward and Gaveston's relationship is uncertain; they may have been friends, lovers or sworn brothers. Gaveston's arrogance and power as Edward's favouriteprovoked discontent both among the baronsand the French royal family, and Edward was forced to exile him. On Gaveston's return, the barons pressured the King into agreeing to wide-ranging reforms called the Ordinances of 1311. The newly empowered barons banished Gaveston, to which Edward responded by revoking the reforms and recalling his favourite. Led by Edward's cousin, the Earl of Lancaster, a group of the barons seized and executed Gaveston in 1312, beginning several years of armed confrontation. English forces were pushed back in Scotland, where Edward was decisively defeated by Robert the Bruceat the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.Widespread famine followed, and criticism of the King's reign mounted.
The Despenser family, in particular Hugh Despenser the Younger, became close friends and advisers to Edward, but in 1321 Lancaster and many of the barons seized the Despensers' lands and forced the King to exile them. In response, Edward led a short military campaign, capturing and executing Lancaster. Edward and the Despensers strengthened their grip on power, formally revoking the 1311 reforms, executing their enemies and confiscating estates. Unable to make progress in Scotland, Edward finally signed a truce with Robert. Opposition to the regime grew, and when Isabella was sent to France to negotiate a peace treaty in 1325, she turned against Edward and refused to return. Isabella allied herself with the exiled Roger Mortimer, and invaded England with a small army in 1326. Edward's regime collapsed and he fled into Wales, where he was captured in November. Edward was forced to relinquish his crown in January 1327 in favour of his fourteen-year-old son, Edward III, and he died in Berkeley Castle on 21 September, probably murdered on the orders of the new regime.
Edward's relationship with Gaveston inspiredChristopher Marlowe's 1592 play Edward II, along with other plays, films, novels and media. Many of these have focused on the possible sexual relationship between the two men. Edward's contemporaries criticised his performance as a king, noting his failures in Scotland and the oppressive regime of his later years, although 19th-century academics later argued that the growth of parliamentary institutions during his reign was a positive development for England over the longer term. Debate has continued into the 21st century as to whether Edward was a lazy and incompetent king, or simply a reluctant and ultimately unsuccessful ruler.

Tuesday, 17 October 2017

Tuesday, 8 August 2017

      No comments

10 Things You May Not Know About the Berlin Wall.

For nearly 30 years the Berlin Wall stood as a concrete manifestation of the Iron Curtain, preventing citizens in communist East Germany from fleeing to democratic, capitalist West Berlin. On the night of November 9, 1989, however, East German authorities suddenly opened the border crossing, and thousands of jubilant Germans celebrated by dancing on top of the wall and chipping away at it with hammers and chisels. On the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, learn 10 surprising facts about the iconic Cold War symbol.
1. The fall of the Berlin Wall happened by mistake.
At a press conference on the evening of November 9, 1989, East German politburo member Günter Schabowski prematurely announced that restrictions on travel visas would be lifted. When asked when the new policy would begin, he said, “Immediately, without delay.” In actuality, the policy was to be announced the following day and would still have required East Germans to go through a lengthy visa application process. Schabowski’s confused answers and erroneous media reports that border crossings had opened spurred thousands of East Berliners to the Berlin Wall. At the Bornholmer Street checkpoint, Harald Jäger, the chief officer on duty, faced a mob growing in size and frustration. Receiving insults, rather than instructions, from his superiors and nervously expecting results of his cancer diagnostic tests the next day, the overwhelmed Jäger opened the border crossing on his own, and the other gates soon followed.
2. The Berlin Wall was erected more than 15 years into the Cold War.
More than 2 million East Germans, most of them skilled laborers and professionals, fled to the West between 1949 and 1961. The Soviet Union had rejected East Germany’s original request to build the wall in 1953, but with defections through West Berlin reaching 1,000 people a day by the summer of 1961, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev finally relented. The residents of Berlin awoke on the morning of August 13, 1961, to find barbed wire fencing had been installed on the border between the city’s east and west sections. Days later, East Germany began to fortify the barrier with concrete.
3. The Berlin Wall was actually two walls.
The 27-mile portion of the barrier separating Berlin into east and west consisted of two concrete walls between which was a “death strip” up to 160 yards wide that contained hundreds of watchtowers, miles of anti-vehicle trenches, guard dog runs, floodlights and trip-wire machine guns.
4. More than 100 people died trying to cross the Berlin Wall.
The Centre for Research on Contemporary History Potsdam and the Berlin Wall Memorial Site and Documentation Center report that at least 138 people were shot dead, suffered fatal accidents or committed suicide after failed escape attempts across the Berlin Wall. Other researchers place the death toll even higher. The first victim was Ida Siekmann, who died on August 22, 1961, after attempting to leap to a West Berlin street below her fourth-floor East Berlin apartment window. The last fatality occurred in March 1989 when a young East German attempting to fly over the wall in a hot air balloon crashed into power lines.
5. More than 5,000 escaped by going over and under the Berlin Wall.
The first defector to escape across the Berlin Wall was 19-year-old East German border guard Corporal Conrad Schumann, who was immortalized on film as he leapt over a 3-foot-high roll of barbed wire just two days after East Germany sealed the border. As the Berlin Wall grew more elaborate, so did escape plans. Fugitives hid in secret compartments of cars driven by visiting West Berliners, dug secret tunnels and crawled through sewers. The three Bethke brothers pulled off the most spectacular escapes. Eldest brother Ingo escaped by floating on an inflatable mattress across the Elbe River in 1975, and eight years later brother Holger soared over the wall on a steel cable he fired with a bow and arrow to a rooftop in West Berlin. In 1989 the pair flew an ultra-light plane over the wall and back to pick up youngest brother Egbert.

6. John F. Kennedy expressed relief when the Berlin Wall was erected.
In June 1961, Khrushchev warned President John F. Kennedy that he would blockade West Berlin if Western forces were not removed, a belligerent act that could lead to war. When Kennedy heard news that the communists had walled off East Berlin instead of cutting off West Berlin, he confided to an aide, “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war. This is the end of the Berlin crisis. The other side panicked—not we. We’re going to do nothing now because there is no alternative except war.”
7. Kennedy did not tell Berliners he was a “jelly doughnut.”
On June 26, 1963, Kennedy famously told a crowd at the Berlin Wall, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” The president intended to express solidarity with the citizens of Berlin by saying he was one of them, but some critics claimed that by adding the indefinite article “ein,” he actually called himself a jelly doughnut, known in much of Germany as a “Berliner.” Linguists say, however, that the president did not commit a grammatical faux pas because “ein” is required when the speaker is speaking figuratively, not literally, about being of a certain nationality, as was obviously the case with Kennedy. In addition, the jam-filled pastry known as a “Berliner” in the rest of Germany is called a “pfannkuchen” in Berlin, so there would have been no confusion among the listeners.
8. East Germany called the wall the “Antifascist Bulwark.”
Rather than keeping its citizens in, the East German government claimed it erected the Berlin Wall to keep Western fascists, spies and ideas out. Two weeks after ordering the construction of the “Antifaschistischer Schutzwall,” East German leader Walter Ulbricht claimed, “We have sealed the cracks in the fabric of our house and closed the holes through which the worst enemies of the German people could creep.”

9. The Brandenburg Gate had once been part of an 18th-century wall.
Prussian King Frederick William II commissioned the iconic triumphal arch straddling East and West Berlin that served as the iconic backdrop for famous presidential speeches by Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. When completed in 1791, the Brandenburg Gate was incorporated into the city’s original Customs Wall, which ringed the city beginning in the 1730s.
10. A piece of the wall stands in the bathroom of a Las Vegas casino.
Official demolition of the Berlin Wall began in the summer of 1990. More than 40,000 wall sections were recycled into building materials used for German reconstruction projects, but a few hundred segments were auctioned off and are now scattered around the globe from the Vatican gardens to the men’s room of the Main Street Station Casino in Las Vegas, where urinals are mounted on a graffiti-covered wall segment protected behind glass.
      No comments

1974 Nixon resigns

In an evening televised address, President Richard M. Nixon announces his intention to become the first president in American history to resign. With impeachment proceedings underway against him for his involvement in the Watergate affair, Nixon was finally bowing to pressure from the public and Congress to leave the White House. “By taking this action,” he said in a solemn address from the Oval Office, “I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.”
Just before noon the next day, Nixon officially ended his term as the 37th president of the United States. Before departing with his family in a helicopter from the White House lawn, he smiled farewell and enigmatically raised his arms in a victory or peace salute. The helicopter door was then closed, and the Nixon family began their journey home to San Clemente, California. Minutes later, Vice President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as the 38th president of the United States in the East Room of the White House. After taking the oath of office, President Ford spoke to the nation in a television address, declaring, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” He later pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed while in office, explaining that he wanted to end the national divisions created by the Watergate scandal.
On June 17, 1972, five men, including a salaried security coordinator for President Nixon’s reelection committee, were arrested for breaking into and illegally wiretapping the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate complex. Soon after, two other former White House aides were implicated in the break-in, but the Nixon administration denied any involvement. Later that year, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post discovered a higher-echelon conspiracy surrounding the incident, and a political scandal of unprecedented magnitude erupted.
In May 1973, the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, headed by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, began televised proceedings on the rapidly escalating Watergate affair. One week later, Harvard law professor Archibald Cox was sworn in as special Watergate prosecutor. During the Senate hearings, former White House legal counsel John Dean testified that the Watergate break-in had been approved by former Attorney General John Mitchell with the knowledge of White House advisers John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, and that President Nixon had been aware of the cover-up. Meanwhile, Watergate prosecutor Cox and his staff began to uncover widespread evidence of political espionage by the Nixon reelection committee, illegal wiretapping of thousands of citizens by the administration, and contributions to the Republican Party in return for political favors.
In July, the existence of what were to be called the Watergate tapes–official recordings of White House conversations between Nixon and his staff–was revealed during the Senate hearings. Cox subpoenaed these tapes, and after three months of delay President Nixon agreed to send summaries of the recordings. Cox rejected the summaries, and Nixon fired him. His successor as special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, leveled indictments against several high-ranking administration officials, including Mitchell and Dean, who were duly convicted.
Public confidence in the president rapidly waned, and by the end of July 1974 the House Judiciary Committee had adopted three articles of impeachment against President Nixon: obstruction of justice, abuse of presidential powers, and hindrance of the impeachment process. On July 30, under coercion from the Supreme Court, Nixon finally released the Watergate tapes. On August 5, transcripts of the recordings were released, including a segment in which the president was heard instructing Haldeman to order the FBI to halt the Watergate investigation. Three days later, Nixon announced his resignation.

Tuesday, 13 June 2017